Just kinda curious, what's the best slot to go offset when you get into heroic level gearing? Granted, it might not happen for a little while (we just started and hell, I still don't even have my 4p yet since the freaking token hasn't dropped, damn you blizz), but as my current offset Tsanga's Helm doesn't have a heroic equivalent, what's the best place between the other 4 for heroic gearing?

there's a lot of argument between shoulders and hands. I don't know which one is 100% better; however, I went with the shoulders since we killed ODS long before Cho'gall and didn't wish to wait so long in hopes of a shoulder token =)

Any good old theorycraft about that? I mean, more than just "I'll go for shoulders since I wont be able to get cho'gall's token before awhile".Mathematicaly, which is really the best offset slot between Shoulders, Hands and maybe Chest?

Mathematically it is always going to be the case that a better-itemized piece in the head,chest or legs will be better value than a piece in the shoulders or hands, all things being equal. Of course, they're not.

The 372 head is Best in slot, barely beating Cho'gall's other drop. So that's not really worth quibbling over, though note that Tsanga's Helm is a slight improvement over T11 normal.

The T11 heroic chest is slightly below Heroic Sark. As crit becomes less valuable than haste this becomes slightly less true, but in general this is true.

The T11 legs are BiS. Not really even close here.

Double Attack handguards beat T11 by a small amount - though not as much as the shoulders.

In terms of bang for your buck the shoulders are the biggest overall upgrade. In terms of ease of upgrading it's much easier to get the T11 heroic hands, legs and chest, meaning you'd have a non-heroic head or a non-heroic shoulder. Based on that it's a lot easier to keep the non-heroic head and go for the heroic offtier shoulders, since the only alternative drops from a hard boss anyway.

I have been wondering this myself, ran with 4set and the offset chest for ages, but looking at Mr. Robot and Mew basically agreeing with it I've swapped to use the shoulders as offset (have the hc tier aswell). Newest version of Rawr though is actually suggesting ditching the 4set and using only Head and Legs as tier pieces, and just going for all the offset pieces in the other slots which would give a lot more mastery (over 200 in fact which increases my bleed damage from 60% to 64%). Rawr also recommends to keep most of these pieces un-reforged as they already have crit and mastery, so giving over 4% more crit than what Mew and Mr. Robot seem to agree on.

What is actually better out of those 2 combinations I have absolutely no idea, funny seems Rawr agrees with Felhoof ^^

The T11 heroic chest is slightly below Heroic Sark. As crit becomes less valuable than haste this becomes slightly less true, but in general this is true.

I am not sure on this point.

First of all, crit does not drop lower than haste at higher gear levels. Take a look at Tangedyn's recent post on RSVs and notice which profile did the most overall dps (hint - it was a crit heavy profile). Haste may have scaled better before the 4.06 patch (maybe) but there is no evidence for that now.

The tier chest has an agility socket bonus vs. mastery for Sarks - which allows you to end up with more secondary stat points than Sarks - so you are trading off total stat points vs. total mastery. Just after 4.06 came out I compared the non-heroic Sarks to the tier chest and found that the tier chest actually produced more dps than Sarks (10dps) - which was contrary to "popular belief" that dated back to pre-4.06 numbers. I did not do the same testing on the heroic versions - but my guess is they will be very close in dps value.

It is likely that the hands/shoulders are the best choices these days and from a progression perspective most people will have heroic tier chests, hands and legs well before the shoulders or helm - and it is likely most will get the heroic tier helm before the shoulders - so unless you are farming everything and can pick and choose what you want, plan on using the non-tier shoulders.

First of all, crit does not drop lower than haste at higher gear levels. Take a look at Tangedyn's recent post on RSVs and notice which profile did the most overall dps (hint - it was a crit heavy profile). Haste may have scaled better before the 4.06 patch (maybe) but there is no evidence for that now.

Note that I did not say 'at higher gear levels' - I merely noted that as haste gets better relative to crit, Sark gets better.

The difference between Sark and T11 is so small with the socket bonus that it's really not worth fretting about. Honestly, the difference between ALL the pieces isn't worth fretting about. As a rule, it is significantly better to do whatever it takes to get the 4p bonus with the highest ilvl pieces you can. That almost certainly means everything but the shoulder first. In addition, it is better to get upgrades in ilvl as fast as you possibly can. It may come to a point where going ilvl 372 and 2pT11 is better than 4pT11 with 2 359s; I've not done the math but I would hardly be surprised. Especially on fights where stacking SotP happens many times during the fight.

Really, stat weights for cats are so similar that there is not nearly the differential. Gemming strats are so trivial that it's not worth talking about. Gone are the days where you want arpen or agi depending on your setup, and gone are the days where there are hard inflection points. We quibble over what is the ultimate best best, but you won't notice if you accidentally went with nontier pants but still have the 4p bonus.

felhoof wrote:It may come to a point where going ilvl 372 and 2pT11 is better than 4pT11 with 2 359s; I've not done the math but I would hardly be surprised. Especially on fights where stacking SotP happens many times during the fight.

The non-tier 372 helm drops off of heroic Cho'gall. Most likely anyone getting heroic Cho'gall down will already have heroic nef down and the opportunity to have 2(3)piece t11 + 2(3)non tier 372 won't arise :/

You wouldn't get offtier helm; you'd get offtier chest, shoulders and hands, and go tier head and tier legs. I was assuming one way or another that you'd have the head as 359 regardless for a while. Sorry I wasn't clearer.

But you would not be trading two offpeice 372 pieces against two tier 359s just due to which bosses are the easiest to kill now. Figure by the time you get Omnitron down for the offset 372 shoulders you would already have the 372 tier gloves, chest and legs. I think you are asking a valid question about two 372 offset pieces being better than two 359 tier pieces + the 4 piece set bonus - but for most players the tradeoff will never materialize.

By the time you get the offset shoulders, you should already have three 372 tier pieces to go with the 359 tier head.

I am not trying to be argumentative here and I wondered about the same thing you did awhile back, but then I looked at the kill order of bosses (my guild went Halfus->Magmaw->Chimaeron->Atramedes) and figured it was a moot point.

The kill order also demonstrates why people should be thinking about using the shoulders as their non-tier piece as they are progressing through the heroics. As a side note, the rogues in my guild are planning on doing that also.

I think I read through this thread 3 times trying to get things straight. So if I understand things correctly, the best off-tier heroic would be the shoulders. Now that is assuming that you have the heroic tier pieces, correct? My guild is currently working through heroics, but I haven't been lucky enough to get any of the tokens for the heroic tier pieces yet (next in line for the next token that drops). I do have the off-tier heroic gloves and chest. So at this point would I be better served by keeping the heroic off-tier chest or the heroic off-tier gloves equipped? I've had both for a bit and tried them both out and felt like the chest gave me the higher dps, but I haven't run any numbers yet. I didn't think that equipping both and losing the 4pc bonus would be a good idea so I didn't really even try that...

As a side note, maybe I'll get lucky and get the shoulders and make this all a moot point, but I've got 3 rogues to compete with.

Yeah all the info in this post is pretty scattered. What everything comes down to is no matter what choice you go with using off tier shoulders, gloves, or chest will yield very similar dps. However, for technical best at this point using tang's latest RSVs would make the shoulders off of heroic ODS as the best off set piece. Which works out nicely due to the fact that by the time you guild gets to the point where your able to obtain the shoulder tier token there is a high chance your already in heroic tier gloves, legs, chest, with the heroic ODS shoulders anyway. As well as well on your way to the heroic helm from nef.

Qbear wrote:Better tell the rogues to back up. Those are your shoulders!

Thankfully no rogues with my raid team

Besides, Combat or Subtlety wouldn't like them, only Assassination would get a kick out of them I'd think.

Also a bit off topic, tearing out my hair because the token (any of them) still hasn't dropped for me...UGH! I think we've only had one total as a guild that was druid/mage/dk/rogue, and it was on an alt run I wasn't part of obviously. And now a lame ARCANE mage of all specs is beginning to edge me out in dps because I haven't had a significant upgrade in forever

Anyways a tad bit off topic, but a question about trinkets (since I don't want to waste space making another thread). I just got my Heroic Cyclone today (yay), so obviously that's one of our BiS trinkets. But I forgot which is better to pair it with, UW or FD? I have UW already, but I can easily get FD if it's better, but I forgot what the scheme was, so if anyone can point me into the right pairing, I'd appreciate it

I think the one exception would be on swipe heavy fights. I am pretty sure Swipe is not benefiting from the UW proc - so you might want to go FD on that - just be careful if you are gearing for hit/exp caps that you do not go over one of the caps if you do so

Unfortunately, it is hard to measure that and I never remember to swap trinkets for kitty (which is odd since I swap trinkets for fights I am bear on all the time).

Alrighty so I'll keep UW then, not like I'm gonna get the 372 one from Nefarian anytime soon XD

Not having the 4p is really beginning to piss me off though...I'm still torn between which token to go after as well since our main healer is Resto, and we both ironically have blue shoulders. So whichever I or she gets, probably will let the other get the other one initially. Still can't believe I have a 359 gearscore with 2 blues lol...but I don't want the emblem back, and PPP has never dropped at all for me, or the token

Sorry to hijack this a little, but is the difference between 2 x T11 and 4 x T11 thought to be considerable? i.e If I have 359 items in all my major slots, would I notice much of a difference if I got 4 x T11? I suppose I'd have to mangle a lot more to keep the buff up.